Penguinistas slide into a big, blue mainframe ocean

Open Mainframe Project announces 2016 work schedule

The Open Mainframe Project, launched in August 2015, has announced its development goals for 2016.

The Linux Foundation collaboration is designed to help Tux get its flippers around big iron. When it was launched at LinuxCon in Seattle last year, its backers included IBM, CA, CompuWare, BMC, SUSE and others.

Apart from the usual statements of support, details were sketchy, but IBM did use the creation of the Project to make a slew of announcements about its LinuxONE platform.

Now, with a bunch of new members coming on board, the Project has also identified its 2016 development priorities. These include:

Adding JIT support to the z port of OpenJDK.

Support for Docker in mainframe environments, with a focus on high-availability virtualised systems.

Blockchain support via the Hyperledger Project.

The Open Mainframe Project has formally accepted an IBM contribution, the Anomaly detection engine for Linux logs, which has been published at GitHub.

The group will also spend a chunk of 2016 certifying "popular Linux monitoring tools" for mainframe applications (but doesn't mention which tools it has in mind).

Hitachi Data Systems, DataKinetics, Sine Nomine Associates and East Carolina University have joined the project. ®